The wind farm is scheduled to come online later this year, wrote Gary Demasi, Director of Google's Global Infrastructure team on the company's blog.
"We announced our commitment to carbon neutrality back in 2007, and since then we’ve been finding ways to power our operations with as much renewable energy as possible," Demasi wrote.
"We’ve been working with GRDA, our local utility, to procure additional renewable energy since we “plugged in” our data center in 2011, and in February of 2012, GRDA approached us about purchasing power from Canadian Hills," he said.
In conjunction with the electricity GRDA already supplies Google to operate its data center, Google will pay GRDA a premium to purchase renewable energy generated by Canadian Hills. This brings the total amount of renewable energy for which Google has contracted to over 260 MW.
"This agreement is a milestone for GRDA because it’s their first-ever wind energy project," Demasi added. "It’s also a milestone for Google because it’s a little different from the previous Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) we’ve signed, where we agreed to buy the energy directly from the developer who built the wind farm. This agreement, by contrast, marks the first time we’ve partnered with a utility provider to increase the amount of renewable energy powering one of our data centers."
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